Japan

The World New Music Days features a wide variety of instrumental combinations, but the majority of music performed at this year’s festival were chamber works. Some of these fell within a trio of “extraordinário” concerts, each focused on a solo instrument, clarinet, cello and saxophone.

Two concerts of special interest that happen each year during the Estonian Music Days are those focusing on works by student composers. One of these took place in Tartu, at the Heino Eller Music School, being the final concert of the 2025 Young Composer competition. The requirements on this occasion …

Let’s return to one of the great maxims of not just contemporary but all music: size isn’t important. In the case of Norway’s Only Connect festival, its short, 2½-day duration belied the fact that its content was highly concentrated. As such, one event started to blur into the next, into …

i’ve commented before on my general disinterest, and usual disregard, for music festival themes. Musica Nova, Helsinki’s biennial new music extravaganza, opted for ‘together’ as its theme this year, and while that word is sufficiently vague as to have almost no meaning, there were numerous times when that word insinuated …

While it didn’t end up in my Best Albums of 2024, one of the releases that almost made it into the list was Mahōgakkō by Japanese musician Hakushi Hasegawa [長谷川白紙]. It’s an insanely, gleefully over-the-top cavalcade of pure pop extroversion, exhausting yet irresistible, mind-melting in its complete stylistic and artistic …

In between the concerts and events at this year’s AFEKT festival, while i was in Tartu i was able to experience the latest venture from Japanese multimedia artist Ryoji Ikeda. Taking place in the spectacular Estonian National Museum, it comprised a solo exhibition and the world première of a collaboration …

i wrote before about the way the World New Music Days acts like a hadron collider, smashing together diverse stylistic and aesthetic ideas from around the world. One of the startling truths to emerge from this violent eclecticism is that, what makes bad music bad, wherever it comes from in …

In recent years the Swiss music festival Forum Wallis has broken up its elements into three parts – instrumental, electronic and folk – taking place separately, in different parts of the Valais region. As last year, i just attended the instrumental performances, which took place over two days in Schloss …

Heteromania is a collaboration between sound artist Conure (aka Mark Wilson) and cyberpunk poet Kenji Siratori, originally created around the start of 2007, but subsequently unreleased, so Wilson made it available online in 2011. While i’m only familiar with a relatively small amount of the extensive Conure back catalogue, i’ve …

It’s a while since there’s been an album devoted to Tōru Takemitsu‘s orchestral music, so it’s been good to spend time with a new release from the BBC Philharmonic, conducted by Christian Karlsen, that explores four of the composer’s works from the ’80s and ’90s. One of them is purely …

Back in April, when i summarised the new music featured at this year’s Proms, i mentioned that the time might have come for me to finally give up trying to find some enthusiasm for its safe, unimaginative offerings. The 2023 season has been up and running for a couple of …

Particles by Japanese composer Shiori Usui consists of four minutes of wild textural mayhem. The title suggests it’s all going to be about light, tiny impacts, and that is how the work begins. However, this opening chorus of skitterings is soon supplanted by the significant heft of what sound like …

As i mentioned previously, the majority of the music i heard at this year’s Dark Music Days fell somewhere between emotional allusion and full-on abstraction. In many ways it was the most abstract music that made some of the strongest and most long-lasting impressions, primarily because of the composers’ focus …

Not everything i heard at Ultima 2021 was bound up in convolutions of meaning. Ryoji Ikeda‘s forays into the world of percussion (which i previously explored in 2018) are a sidestep away from his more central work in multi-layered representations and interpretations of data, instead concerned much more directly with …

For the next work in this year’s nature-inspired Lent Series, i’m returning to the world of birds. Japanese composer Akira Nishimura‘s 1993 orchestral work Bird Heterophony takes its inspiration, in part at least, from a folk tale from Papua New Guinea, in which a young woman witnesses her brother transformed …

As was the case at last year’s festival, most of the concerts at Forum Wallis 2020 focused on works for ensemble. However, while in 2019 the majority of performances involved larger numbers of players, due to the pandemic almost all of the pieces this year were for small chamber groupings, …